How to easily save multimedia streams

Don’t you hate it when you visit a website, see an interesting movie stream and can’t find a way to download it to view it again later ? Most websites hide their streaming content urls using javascript or other scripting languages and it is almost impossible to detect the url of the stream manually. Thankfully mouser coded the tool url snooper which does this work for us.

Install it from the link above and make sure you install WinPcap as well when the installation routine asks you. Once installed you open it and enable the advanced mode (under File). Url Snooper automatically analyses the traffic that your networks card manages and displays every url it detects. To make things easier you should activate the protocol filter and enable multimedia url’s simplify all. This makes sure that only multimedia urls are displayed and everything else is filtered.

You can test the urls by right-clicking and selecting to play the current url which should open the appropriate video player and play the file.

We need a second tool that records the video or audio from the urls that we found. One great tool that was unfortunately discontinued is Streambox VCR. Install Streambox and switch back to url snooper. Click on general options and right-click in the last text field.

Choose Add Link and browse to the dir in which streambox vcr was installed. Select the following file StreamBoxVCR1Beta31\vcr_31smfplus.exe, leave command arguments blank and add a descriptive name to it.

Once done switch back to search. Whenever you right-click on an url you have the option to load it into streambox and automatically download it from there.

Sometimes the automatic transfer from url snopper to streambox is not working. A workaround would be to copy the link in url snooper by right-clicking on it and choosing edit -> paste link in streambox to save it.

This method was tested with various sites including C-Span, BBC and the movies guide at real player.

Take a look at this short video introduction to url snooper, it is really helpful to understand the concept.

A tool that is able to save windows media streams is SDP (free of course), try this if streambox is not able to save those streams.